The First Managed Solution for WooCommerce Stores

Today we’re announcing the first managed hosting solution for WooCommerce stores and it’s far more than just installing the plugin onto a WordPress site.

Our focus has always been consistent

For more than twenty years Liquid Web has been serving growing companies and the web professionals that have helped them get online. In that time, we’ve served customers in over 130 countries, managed more than 500,000 sites, run 5 global data centers and equipped 600 hosting professionals to deliver heroic support.

We have many different product offerings – from dedicated servers to virtual private servers, from cloud solutions to Managed WordPress – but each offering has been designed with the same goal – to help growing companies and the web professionals that serve them.

So what happens when you realize that you need a new and different kind of platform to deliver that kind of value to store owners and the agencies that build eCommerce sites?

You build a new platform. One that’s focused on performance.

You can’t just install WooCommerce and call it a day

Most hosts say they can host WooCommerce sites. By this, they simply mean that you can install WooCommerce on their WordPress hosting. But an online store isn’t a blog. You can’t make it fast simply by caching everything. This isn’t a WordPress site. It’s a WooCommerce store – and that means you need to think about it differently.

Customer may not know, until after they’ve paid for three years in advance, that many of these hosts offer cheap, shared hosting plans that will quickly buckle under any kind of traffic load.

Some store owners have started looking at hosted platforms

It’s no surprise or shock why those same customers, having discovered that their stores performed so poorly, though the problem was WooCommerce. In response, many of them have started looking at hosting platforms.

Today’s options aren’t simply a variety of self-hosted libraries that only technologists can manage. Customers are looking at Shopify, Squarespace eCommerce, and BigCommerce.

In fact, when these hosted solutions write up head to head comparisons with WooCommerce – the most popular online store platform today – they focus on all the hosting and technology challenges that a store owner would face if they were trying to build a store on their own.

The good news is that store owners don’t have to do it on their own.

For twenty years, our notion of “managed” hasn’t just meant patches to software. We take on server administration, hardware management, OS and software support, security and monitoring.

When we say we’re the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting, we mean it.

Our goal wasn’t simply to create a high-performance platform for hosting WooCommerce sites. It was to build a total solution for store owners so that they could compare their options side by side.

A Total Solution for Store Owners

To create a platform that would offer a total solution, we had to add components to WooCommerce that weren’t natively there – like leveraging Jilt for their abandoned cart recovery features, and Glew.io for their enterprise-level analytics & reporting.

Ours isn’t a fragmented platform where small stores use one platform and enterprises use another. Customers can watch their stores grow as fast as they like without ever feeling a hiccup.

And speaking of scale and performance, like enterprise stores experience, we’ve invested in changing how WooCommerce stores orders (custom order tables) handle times with high concurrency transactions.

We brought over the image compression from our Managed WordPress product so that media wouldn’t slow store performance, and we integrated every store with Algolia to improve store indexing and searches.

The result of this completely new container-based platform with optimizations and integrations is that the stores we’ve tested on it are loading in under 1 second. And that’s the kind of performance every store owner wants.

We’re excited to invite you to check it out

It’s been 12 months of work – 12 months of engineers, our product team and our partners working together to create the first managed platform dedicated solely to WooCommerce stores.

When Pagely, Zippy Kid, and WP Engine created companies focused on WordPress hosting, I was delighted. It meant I could stop talking to hosting companies that just wanted to sell me more RAM.

Unfortunately, for way too long, store owners have called regular hosts, shared hosts, and even some managed WordPress hosts, and experienced the same frustration of talking to someone who didn’t understand that their WooCommerce store needed more than just some RAM.

I’m thrilled to be the first, though I’m sure we won’t be the last, to step into the Managed WooCommerce Hosting space with an offering that is more than just the installation of the WooCommerce plugin.

Chris Lema is our Vice President of Products at Liquid Web. A well-known blogger and public speaker, Chris has led our product teams to develop and launch our Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce product lines.